The Accelerating Universe

In 1998 two teams traced back the expansion of the universe over billions of years and discovered that it was accelerating, a startling discovery that suggests that more than 70% of the cosmos is contained in a previously unknown component of the universe, called Dark Energy. The 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Brian Schmidt, leader of the High Redshift Supernova Search Team, will describe this discovery and explain how astronomers have used observations that trace our universe's history back more than 13 billion years, leading them to ponder the ultimate fate of the cosmos.